Fête des Lumières

I spent Thursday and Friday evening practicing a lot of Chinese with my roommate. It was jam packed full of laughs. I have to say that one of the best parts about learning a languages is that it turns you into a kid again. You have a billion questions, you ask a billion questions and you repeat this process a billion times.

...

Last night I was at Lyon to whiteness the festival of lights. It is a big celebration in Lyon where they decorate the entire city with a more lights than you count. It is like taking Christmas decorations to a whole new level.

We arrived to Lyon by bus and all 100+ of us piled out of two buses. We walked to the train station decided to take the metro to the center of town. The train station in Lyon is pretty big and it is perhaps easier to get lost train the train station than the city itself.

Finally we made are way to the metro and I would have to say with perfect timing any later and we would not have fit into the metro. The transportation strikes miht be still lingering but the metro was absolutely nuts. Luckily we were the first stop on the line so the entire crowd tried to back itself inside the metro but not everyone could fit. Imagine that this is just the first stop.

So there we were, packed in there, on our way to the center of town. The first stop, packed with people, was not pleased to see the condition of the metro. Eventually our stop had arrived and we had to plow our way out the metro. I was wondering if body surfing would have been easier.

We arrived out side of the station and there was absolute darkness outside. It was so dark that I was wondering where we were... Aaawww just kidding. There were lights, and people everywhere. It was really neat to because it was like turning the city into a big Christmas village. Right in the center of town there was a huge ferris wheel. The statue in the center square was in cased in a huge snowglobe. Music and merriment and lights were the themes of the night.

Every direction you looked there was something interesting going on. It is really hard to manage a group of big people but eventually we made our way around and found some more people. People were hungry so we stopped to get some food. Eventually the group started walking around and made it towards the western side of the city. American crowd wanted to hang out in a smoky pub for awhile. I decided to take of with my Japanese and Korean amies and we just started wondering. Our first choice of a direction to go was a bust. Basically it was so crowded that the walking street was making zero progress towards reaching anywhere. We turned around and headed the other direction.

Eventually we hit the same problem going the other way as well but found the source of the problem, the line to the metro. It spilled out into the street and took up the entire street, halting most movement. We made our way around the crowd and just decided to shoot up the hill to get a look of the city.

Eventual we made our way to Fourvière Cathedral. The view of the city was really neat at night with seeing the streets with all the lights and seeing the ferris wheel. We spent some time on the top of the hill, enjoyed the view, and then made our way back down the hill. We enjoyed some hot wine from one of the many dealer that were spread throughout the city. It was like hot cider but even better!

We found a little area with music playing and afterwards an area and enjoyed watching the kids on the fast-swinging-spinning-ride. We walked around a bit more and enjoyed some more lights. We got to eat some really good chocolate that was just amazing. Wow, that chocolate was good.

Eventually we managed to wander our way back towards the bus. A long the way we ran into a street performance which was just weird. Many people wearing lampshades and lights. Some of them were playing music, others where howling, others were singing and dancing. Overall it was pretty strange to say the least. After we had or fill of weirdness we continued walking.

Finally we were back on the bus and rock out to some of my music on our ride back home. It was really fun night.